The poem begins with a familiar image: Ophelia, the drowned young woman from Shakespeare's *Hamlet*, floating in the river Avon with green hair and "swimming eyes." The picture is beautiful but unsettling. The bridge "collapsing into suicides" suggests that her death isn't a single event but something that keeps repeating, and her skirts billowing in the mists make her seem half real, half ghost.
Then the tone snaps. "I laugh" is a short, jarring line, and the poem never explains it. Is it nervous laughter, cold detachment, or a reaction to how stylized this old tragedy has become? The reader has to decide. What follows is almost bare: a magpie flies, a yellow primrose appears. These small natural details feel calm, even indifferent, as if life carries on regardless. The mood is eerie and dreamlike, with a strange mix of grief, irony, and distance.